Telecommut
It was technically an office. It had a desk in it, and a chair, and enough space to work. I’d moved there deliberately – closer to my team, which felt like the right thing to do at the time.
What it also had was no natural light. A ceiling that felt low in a way that had nothing to do with its actual height. Shelving units full of spare parts that nobody had cleared out in years. The particular quality of silence that comes from being below ground level in a building full of people who are all, somehow, above you.
I spent a significant chunk of one of the hardest periods of my working life in that room. And the room wasn’t even the main problem.
Photo by Lydia Williams on Unsplash
The manager
I’ve written already about the manager from this period – the nit-picking, the constantly shifting focus, the reports that came back covered in corrections that weren’t really about the reports. The standard that kept moving no matter how hard I chased it.
What I didn’t write about was what it did to me.
He wasn’t confident. I understand that now in a way I absolutely didn’t then. He was new to his role, uncertain of his own judgment, and unable to extend trust to anyone else because he hadn’t yet built it in himself. That’s a recognisable pattern. It even has a kind of logic to it.
But here’s what that pattern did in practice. His lack of confidence fed mine. Slowly, consistently, in ways I didn’t notice until I was already quite far down.
Every interaction became evidence. Every correction on a report confirmed something I was starting to believe about myself. Every meeting I left having failed to hit a standard I didn’t fully understand chipped away at something I needed to do my job well. I started interpreting every transaction, every encounter, every conversation through a single lens – and that lens was not a fair or accurate one. It was the lens of someone whose confidence had been quietly dismantled over months.
I went looking for help. And I got it – good, solid, sensible advice from people who knew the situation. Some of it was practical. Some of it was “wait him out.”
The waiting-him-out advice was technically correct. He was eventually managed out. Others on the team did wait, and they survived, and they came out the other side.
But by the time that happened I was already gone. Because I didn’t have the mental resilience at that point in my life to outlast it. The room, the manager, the confidence that had been slowly eroded – all of it together was more than I had the resources to carry. And nobody’s advice, however good, could change what I had available to work with at that particular moment.
I left. And I carried more with me than I should have had to.
What I Understand Now That I Didn’t Then
Looking back, I can see things I couldn’t see from inside it.
It really was the manager. He was the primary problem – his style, his insecurity, his inability to manage me in a way that brought out anything good. That’s not me rewriting history. That’s accurate.
But it wasn’t only the manager. It was the manager plus the environment plus the timing plus where I was mentally plus what resources I had available to cope. All of those things together created a situation I couldn’t navigate. Any one of them differently and the story might have ended differently.
That distinction matters enormously. Because if I’d left thinking “the manager was the problem” – full stop – I’d have gone looking for a better manager. Which is reasonable but incomplete.
What I actually needed to understand was: what specifically did his style do to me, and why? What does that tell me about what I need from a management relationship? What were the conditions that made me vulnerable to it at that particular time? And what would I need to have in place – in myself, in my environment, in my support structures – to handle something similar differently in future?
Those are harder questions than “find a better manager.” But they’re the ones that actually change anything.
The questions that tell you what you need to do next
If you’re in a difficult management relationship right now – or trying to make sense of one you’ve left – here are the questions I’d ask you to work through. There are no universal right answers. The answers are yours, and they’re context-dependent, and they will tell you what to do next more reliably than any advice I or anyone else could give you.
About Your Manager
What specifically does your manager do that makes things hard? Name it precisely – not “they micromanage” but what that looks like in practice, how often, in what circumstances. The more specific you are, the more useful the information.
Is this consistent, or does it depend on circumstances? A manager who is difficult under pressure but reasonable the rest of the time is a different problem from one who is consistently undermining. Both are real problems. They have different solutions.
How do others on your team experience this manager? Is the difficulty concentrated on you, or is it widespread? If it’s widespread, you’re dealing with a manager problem. If it’s concentrated on you, there may be a dynamic between the two of you specifically that’s worth understanding – without blaming yourself for it.
Is your manager new, under pressure, or in over their head – or is this simply who they are? A manager who is struggling because they’ve been thrown into a role without adequate support is a different situation from one who has been managing this way for twenty years and has no intention of changing. The first might improve. The second almost certainly won’t.
About What It’s Doing To You
How does their style affect you specifically? Not in general – specifically. What does it do to your confidence, your output, your sense of yourself at work? Does it follow you home? Does it colour your weekends?
What causes you to dread going in? Is it them specifically, or is it something they represent – the unpredictability, the sense of failure, the feeling of being unseen or undervalued?
Is there anything you could do differently that would change the dynamic – and do you have the energy and the headspace to try it? This is not a question about blame. It’s a question about agency. Sometimes there are things that would help. Sometimes the situation is genuinely beyond your ability to influence from where you’re standing. Both are valid answers.
About The Wider Picture
Is your manager a symptom of the organisation or an anomaly within it? Are there other good managers around them? Are they respected by leadership or merely tolerated? Would this manager survive in a healthier organisation – or does this place need them to operate exactly this way?
This question matters because it tells you whether leaving the manager would be enough, or whether leaving the organisation is what’s actually needed. A bad manager in a good organisation is a solvable problem – you can move teams, outlast them, escalate appropriately. A bad manager who is a product of a broken system is a different thing entirely.
About Your Resources
What do you have available right now to deal with this? Not what you should have, or what you’d have in better circumstances. What you actually have, today.
Are you in a position to outlast it if it’s temporary? And what is it costing you while you wait?
These last two questions are the ones I wish someone had asked me in that basement room. Because the advice I received was good. The problem was that I didn’t have what it would have taken to act on it. And nobody helped me see that clearly enough to make a different decision.
Sometimes the right answer is to address the situation. Sometimes it’s to leave. And sometimes it’s to recognise that you don’t currently have the resources to do either well – and that getting those resources has to come first.
What The Answers Tell You
If your manager is an anomaly in an otherwise functional organisation, and you have the resilience and the support to outlast them or escalate appropriately, that’s one answer.
If your manager is a product of a broken system, and leaving the manager wouldn’t actually change the fundamental environment, that’s a different answer.
If you’re already running on empty and the situation is costing you more than you have to give, that’s another answer entirely – and it’s one that needs to be taken seriously regardless of what the organisation looks like from the outside.
None of these answers is “it was just a bad manager and now I know to avoid bad managers.” Because bad managers don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in organisations, in environments, in specific moments of your life and career. And understanding all of those layers is what tells you what you actually need next – not just what you need to escape.
The Engineering Career Clarity Guide won’t tell you whether to stay or go. That’s your decision and it depends on context I don’t have. But it will help you get specific about what you actually need from a working environment – so that when you do move, you’re moving toward something, not just away from something.
[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]
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